Thank you, Mr. Chair. Just general comments on the Housing Corporation from what I have dealt with over the past nine months or so since our election.
To date, about 80 per cent of all of the concerns from communities in Tu Nedhe have been on
housing. The majority of those concerns have been on seniors’ housing and home ownership. I look at this as a serious problem. I see it as a problem that started with the fact that the NWT Housing Corporation changed completely. They changed their focus on housing without completing a needs survey. The needs survey is essentially a tool that allows you to develop some sort of a housing plan. The housing strategy lasts until the next needs survey and is then based on the needs survey, looking at what the needs are, the incomes in those communities and so on. Then some sort of a focused housing strategy is developed.
What happens here is that the NWT Housing Corporation, without the benefit of a needs survey, has proceeded to change programs designed and put in place for the needs survey that was looking at the needs at that point. It changed their focus by, as mentioned earlier, reducing from 14 programs to 4 programs. I don’t really understand the concept of that. To me, it eliminated the focus on communities. Not every community in the Northwest Territories has the same needs.
The way I look at the communities, there are some that have a core need lower than the national average. An example would be, although I’m not trying to take away from these communities, the city of Yellowknife or the town of Norman Wells. Both of those communities have core needs far below the national average, while we have many, many, many communities across the Territories that are three times the national average. What I expected the Housing Corporation to do was to focus on reducing core need across the territory by addressing the core need issues that were much higher than the national average.
When I talk about focus, I am talking about a focus on the communities. In reality I don’t understand how the Housing Corporation can develop a strategy when you have needs survey data that’s old. Therefore, how do they know what has happened over the last 40 years, with the strategy that was in place up until that point, to be able to rewrite the programs? How do they know which communities have the highest core need or the lowest core need, except if they look back into history and see the trend? I’m assuming that may be the only way, and you can imagine how inaccurate that could be.
In addition to that, additional focus on the needs of various core needs groups…. Back several years ago seniors had the highest core needs. Individuals over 50 years old had the highest core need across the country, followed by single people with single incomes. So there was some focus on those two groups, and then the communities with the highest core needs were also the focus of the Housing Corporation in order to address the core need
issues. Like I said, it’s a matter of maybe lifting some serious core need issues.
I don’t know if this is correct, but assuming that the national average core needs issues is around 12 per cent across the country and that there are communities in the Northwest Territories that are well below that, and there are communities that are above 36 per cent — more than three times the national average…. My theory is that the Housing Corporation has to be able to concentrate its resources on the areas where there is most need. Right now it seems like the contribution from the Housing Corporation, the Infrastructure Acquisition Plan…. Although there is not enough in repairs really to do any really significant work other than maybe maintain a few people in their private homes for a few additional years, there is no real strategy to address the big issue of repair programs for senior citizens.
Like I said, the majority of the work in Tu Nedhe that has been dealing with seniors, where they have lost a program that was at one time in place — an easy program to administer by the Housing Corporation and an easy program for the seniors to understand…. That was taken out; it was replaced with a program which requires a lot more documentation than the seniors are used to dealing with. This will go on, and I’m assuming that eventually the seniors will get to a core needs point where the houses will not be repairable.
Concentrating a little bit of money on helping the seniors before their housing goes beyond economical repair would go a long way to assisting housing in general. I know that some complained about a lot of the seniors just jumping into public housing so that they don’t have to pay rent. However, that’s a program that’s done, and that’s a path. But right now we have seniors that are in their own homes that can just afford to operate their houses. They can’t really afford to do any enhancements in their units. I think that the Housing Corporation, with a little bit more expenditure, a little more focus on what they have to do in order to address these issues, could keep a lot of seniors out of core needs and eliminate additional pressures on the public housing inventory.
I think the affordable housing strategy is a good strategy, if the Housing Corporation had a good idea of the core need in each of the communities and were able to compare core needs from one community to another. Like I’ve indicated several times, my community of Fort Resolution in Tu Nedhe has empty AHI units — four or five empty units. What’s happening is that those units are based on the core need of the community, and they end up being inaccessible to the community. So what happens generally is that those houses will
slowly, eventually address another housing issue that could be housing for professionals.
However, that’s not the issue that those units were attempting to address, so they do nothing towards addressing the core need issue in that community. They will address other important areas, mind you, for teachers who need housing and so on. But that money is supposed to be focused on addressing core needs issues, so it’s beyond me why the houses were built and not allocated by this time. I hear that the houses were only there for eight months, but I know they’ve been there longer. I don’t know if they weren’t finalized until eight months ago or whatever.
The other thing is that I hope the Housing Corporation would have some sort of a strategy in place that would address the whole issue of the CMHC declining fund. It seems like this is starting to hit us, and it looks like the Housing Corporation is going to be ready to react. I’m hoping that when the CMHC money starts to decline sharply a couple of years from now, the Housing Corporation has a strategy in place to address that issue and not just a reaction.